I am gonna be out of town for a few days - going to NC to do a wedding.

I will be back and blogging with fury.

Actually that reminds me... I am moving to Vicksburgblogs... so I will have another home when I get back. Adjust all your links friends.

"I would like to buy $3.00 worth of God, please. Not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep, but just enough to buy a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don't want enough to love a black man or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation. I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy $3.00 worth of God, please."
--Wilbur Reese

If Christians were to start a political party - what be its stances?
Could there be a party which is big enough to encompass the vast different ideologies that Christians hold?

I have been thinking a great deal about this - what would a truly pro-life party look like? Can politics even be wed with the Kingdom?

And if there could be a new party- what would that say about some our petty denominational differences - or would it show the world a unified Christianity where it counts - in the lives of people?

I picked up this link from a great blog with a link to this article.

I agree with most of the assessment in the article - one aspect of "life" cannot be divorced from the others. But what I am seeing though is that much of what we call America is built on a faulty ideology to its core. So whereas I agree with Dr. Stassen about the pro-life issue -we simply however cannot say abortions went up with Bush therefore I am going to vote for Kerry. I mean do we really think that Kerry is looking out for the people as well? I do applaud the Dr. who wrote the article for living out a Christian ethic consistently - maybe the entire church should as well... but would anyone vote either Democrat or Republican then?

I am not the biggest Bill O'Reilly fan out there - I do listen to him some - but this is crazy. What do you think?

Is it possible to be so countercultural that we become relevant to the society around us? In other words does one have to be so much like the surrounding culture to be relevant or could a group be relevant because they are so different from the surrounding culture? i.e. Amish.

Whereas the Amish (simple folk) are not relevant technologically do they have relevance in other, more important areas? Such as making a rushed world slow down or providing a critique of the rampant consumerism in our society?

How does the church become totally relevant and totally countercultural? Is this possible?

I seem to have this pathology that I can't soil pretty things. It is kinda like getting a new journal to write in and not being able to because I am afraid of "messing" it up with writing. So thus with this blog. I know the stupidity of that - but nonetheless I find myself not blogging because of the same reason. So I decided to blog anyway...

Yesterday I was discussing a topic with some youth that I spend time with - we were talking about the redeem-ability of certain types of music. They believed (like most today) that there is no form of music that cannot be redeemed for the Kingdom of God. Whereas I agree with them on the surface, (most forms that I believe cannot be redeemed have more to do with personal taste than true "irredeemability" (is that a word?)) I challenged them to think about what they said on other levels.
1) All things are inherently redeemable.
2) Then all music is redeemable.
3) Therefore other things must be redeemable as well such as specific forms of government, etc.

When I brought up to them on the basis of their argument that communism and socialism, under their argument, must be redeemable, they kinda shirked a little. I told them that if this is true than the problem with all things whether music or socialism or even capitalism is that without Christ in the center it has the potential to become corrupt.

Is it possible for there to be a communist form of government that is redeemable? Socialist? Even anarchy? What do you think?

"The members of the Church of the Savior (in Washington, D.C.) pursue both the inward journey of faith and the outward journey of social justice. Gordon Cosby and his wife, Mary, lead this community to find the substance of their lives in pursuing Christ and ministering to the broken in their neighborhood. When someone in the church senses a call from God for service, the church prays about it, and if God is in it, the vision is refined and a handful of members commit to bringing it to fruition.

Over a cup of soup at the Potter's House, a coffeehouse run by the church, eighty-plus-year-old Gordon shared with me how much more can be accomplished by ten people who discover their call than one hundred who are unsure. His desire is to lead people to living from the focused center of God's kingdom and then following the call God gives them. When I asked him why more churches don't follow his example and better their cities, he responded with a rather sobering comment: "Because the servant leadership Jesus offers us is a leadership toward unimpressiveness."

- from Buck Naked Faith by Eric Sandras

What would it be like if Christians embraced their niche and call and together transformed a city with "unimpressive" servant leadership?

Oh Lord let me be a nobody used for You!!

Well, my new blog is up and running. Hopefully with such a good-looking skin, developed by the notorious Hugo Fitch, I will blog more and begin to pontificate again.